She repeatedly returned to Indochina, always reporting on the dissidents and those left behind by history. Her last visit to Cambodia was in 1993, long after the genocide and just as the country had found peace. Her final return to Vietnam was in 2000. She found those trips “very depressing.” “Time marches on but humankind does not progress,” she wrote to her aunt, Alison Sims.12
One year later she retired. She told Agence France-Presse she was “too old to keep up with front-line reporting and that was the only kind I liked.” She also complained about the insane demand for constant updates. “It’s like we’re all mosquitoes dancing on the surface of a pond. We have to move so fast that reporting has suffered. It’s nowhere as meticulous as it was.”13
Webb bought herself a small farm outside Sydney in Hunter Valley from her beloved aunt. Her plans included inviting John Stearman to join her. They had seen each other irregularly over the decades and had talked of retiring together. But Stearman died working in South America. Webb wrote an essay for War Torn, a collection of nine personal stories by women who reported from Vietnam. Then, except for one year teaching journalism at Ohio University, Webb spent her retirement catching up with her family and growing vegetables in Australia. She died of cancer in 2007; at her side were her sister, Rachel, and brother Jeremy, as they had been so many times before.
Agence France-Presse created the Kate Webb Prize in 2008, an annual award given to a locally employed Asian journalist for exceptional work in difficult or dangerous conditions in the region, a fair description of the circumstances the young Kate Webb found herself in in 1970. In 2019, her image appeared on an Australian postage stamp honoring women in war.
FRANCES FITZGERALD’S ARTICLES on the war and Vietnam appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times, More Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and other publications for years after the war ended. If a woman reporter was invited on a panel to discuss the war, it was inevitably Frances FitzGerald.
She attained the stature of a public intellectual, writing books that challenged worn truths and winning praise from the New York editors who mattered most. William Shawn of the New Yorker, who had published the excerpts from her book, singled her out as “one of the best non-fiction writers of her generation,” while Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books called her a “master of complicated ideas and difficult issues.”
Within the world of letters and foreign affairs, she played major roles as president of the PEN American Center promoting freedom of speech, as president of the Society of American Historians, and as an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
She never lost her place in the rarified circles of New York society, either, and dated a series of accomplished and often glamorous men.
Her later books were eclectic. Her investigation of the dull and aimless history books used in American secondary schools showed how they deprived Americans of any real sense of their own history. She profiled four prophetic communities for signs of where the United States was headed in 1986: a gay activist community in San Francisco, an ashram in Oregon, the fundamentalist church of Jerry Fallwell, and the Florida sun city retirement community. She next turned to military matters in a deep investigation of the multibillion-dollar Star Wars defense program of Ronald Reagan, which, like all of her books, was a critical success.14
After returning to Vietnam with the photographer Mary Cross to cowrite a photojournalist book, Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth, her most recent book to date is The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, which was published in 2017 when she was seventy-seven years old. It was uniformly praised, particularly by academics. The American Scholar said it succinctly: “FitzGerald’s brilliant book could not have been more timely, more well-researched, more well-written, or more necessary.” She won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for that book—forty-five years after she had swept the awards for Fire in the Lake.
In 2020 the Society of American Historians awarded her the inaugural Tony Horwitz Prize for lifetime work of “wide appeal and enduring significance.”
At fifty, FitzGerald married Jim Sterba, a well-respected foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who had covered the Vietnam War. They met late in their lives. He wrote of their courtship and marriage in Frankie’s Place: A Love Story, portraying himself as the Spencer Tracy to her Katherine Hepburn, a Midwestern journeyman to her Brahmin diva.
Some later critics raised doubts about Fire in the Lake. When the 2017 multipart PBS documentary on the Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick offered what it called a full reading list to accompany the series, the fifty-eight history books did not include Fire in the Lake, the most honored book on the war.15
Fredrik Logevall, the respected historian of Vietnam, warned that while parts of the book did prove problematic with later research, he feared that some of the criticism was tinged with envy. He said: “Whatever we want to call it—a first-cut history—this book stands up very well even though she didn’t have access to archives. I would put it on a short shelf of really important books on the war. It’s of enduring importance.”16
But then Kate Webb’s On the Other Side: 23 Days with the Viet Cong was not on the Ken Burns list of recommended Vietnam books; nor was Catherine Leroy’s Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam. In fact, the Burns list did not include a single published work by any of the female journalists who covered the war.
THE WAR DID not end for me as I thought it would. Back in Washington, DC, now a staff reporter at the Washington Post, I was upended by the sparse news coming out of Cambodia. After throwing everyone out of the cities and towns, the victorious Khmer Rouge isolated the country completely. No telephone, no mail, no cables, no air traffic save from Vietnam and China. All borders shut. The few refugees who escaped spoke of executions and hunger, of a regime that treated people like work animals. I was desperate to go there and see for myself. After four years petitioning the government of the Khmer Rouge, I received a visa and set out in December 1978 with one other American reporter, Richard Dudman, and Malcolm Caldwell, a British professor, to report from Cambodia. We were the first and last journalists allowed in Pol Pot’s country.
For two weeks we were taken around the country on prearranged schedules with no time to explore on our own. We were kept under guard at all times, essentially under house arrest. We were shown only staged happy villagers and happy workers. Yet the Khmer Rouge could not hide what was missing. All normal life was gone: empty towns, empty schools, empty markets, empty pagodas and churches and mosques. No one lingered on the streets. On our last day, we interviewed Pol Pot himself. For nearly two hours, he lectured us on Vietnam’s plan to invade Cambodia and the need for NATO to come to his aid. That night at our guesthouse, Cambodian assassins attacked us, threatening me and Dudman and killing Caldwell. We waited hours before we were rescued. The next day we left for home, and the Vietnamese did invade and overthrew the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge.
Shaken by the experience and my horror at what the country went through, I spent the next five years researching and writing a history of the nearly four years of Khmer Rouge rule, entitled When the War Was Over. They devastated the country, killing off nearly a quarter of the population through starvation, neglect, and murder, attempting to erase the culture and civilization, and leaving a nation utterly traumatized. I have continued to report from Cambodia.
My journalism career was traditional. After the Washington Post, I became the senior foreign editor of National Public Radio and then I joined the New York Times as an editor and then reporter in the Washington bureau. I am the mother of two grown children and a grandmother. My husband is Bill Nash, a retired army major general, who led the peacekeeping mission for the US Army in Bosnia in 1995 and who, as a young lieutenant in Vietnam, was part of the 1970 invasion of Cambodia.
This book was triggered by my appearance in 2015 as an expert witness at the genocide trial of senior Khmer Rouge leaders. The Extraordinary Chamb
ers in the Courts of Cambodia was established to try the senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide from 1975 to 1979. It was the only international criminal tribunal ever convened to address the long Vietnam War or its consequences. It was constructed so that foreign officials and foreign nations were excluded from scrutiny, allowing China and the United States to escape judgment.
The courtroom in Phnom Penh was solemn during the three full days of my testimony. Robed Cambodian and international jurists sat on all sides of me. The two surviving defendants, Nuon Chea, number two to Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, the head of state, were seated to my right. I felt bolted to my chair by the profound realization that my work could help convict these monsters. The first day’s transcript filled 107 pages.17
Although there were thousands of witnesses, there were no more than a handful of expert witnesses like me. The prosecution went over minute details from my book, my interviews with senior Khmer Rouge figures, and from that rare firsthand trip through the country under Pol Pot and my subsequent research—all damning. On the last day, the defense predictably attempted to destroy my credibility. Anta Guisse, a French lawyer, represented the defendant Khieu Samphan.
“I’m going to finish with this question,” she said and then quoted from a 1986 review of my book by David Chandler, a respected professor of modern Cambodia. He criticized me for writing my book because I was only a journalist and not an academic. He claimed I hadn’t done sufficient original research even though I was the only author who had reported from Cambodia during the war and the revolution and who had done countless and often exclusive interviews.
Do you have anything to say?” Guisse asked.
Yes, I said. Then I read the positive reviews printed on my book jacket from the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Guisse said I hadn’t answered the question. She pushed me. I was hoping not to get into a petty dispute over one bad review during a genocide trial, but at the same time I was not going to allow that review to undermine my testimony. So I explained how David Chandler had been selective in his dismissal of journalists writing history. Every other journalist who had written a book on modern Cambodia, even novels, had received a nice review from Chandler. I was the exception. How was I different?
“I am the only woman journalist who wrote such a book.”18
Guisse, a French woman of color who had spoken about sexism in the international legal field, thanked me for the “clarification” and sat down.
The two defendants were convicted of genocide.
And something became clear to me. No one knew what it had meant to be a woman covering the Vietnam War. I had never tried to tell the story. Now, through the extraordinary pioneering lives of Catherine Leroy, Frances FitzGerald, and Kate Webb, I have.
Catherine Leroy about to jump with the 173rd Airborne in Operation Junction City, South Vietnam, February 22, 1967. © Bob Cole. Courtesy Dotation Catherine Leroy.
French photographer Gilles Caron caught an unguarded Catherine Leroy upon their return from a helicopter offensive, Vietnam, December 1967. © Fondation Gilles Caron
Frankie Fitzgerald. © Getty.
Frances FitzGerald reports from the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam, 1973. (Her colleague is David Greenway of the Washington Post.) Courtesy Frankie Fitzgerald.
Kate Webb. © Getty.
Kate Webb at a news conference on May 1, 1971, the day she was released from captivity by the North Vietnamese in Cambodia. She is wearing her Chinese good luck medal. © AP.
Catherine Leroy photographs her jump during Operation Junction City, South Vietnam, February 22, 1967. Photograph by Catherine Leroy. © Dotation Catherine Leroy.
Evacuation of a mortally wounded Marine, Hill 484, South Vietnam, October 1966. Photograph by Catherine Leroy. © Dotation Catherine Leroy.
The Vietnam War, c. 1967. Photograph by Catherine Leroy. © Dotation Catherine Leroy.
Fleeing civilians during Tet Offensive, Hue, South Vietnam, February 1968. Photograph by Catherine Leroy. © Dotation Catherine Leroy.
US Navy corpsman Vernon Wike helps a dying Marine on Hill 881 near Khe Sanh, South Vietnam, April/May 1967. Photograph by Catherine Leroy. © Dotation Catherine Leroy.
US soldier during a search and destroy operation, South Vietnam, c. 1967. Photograph by Catherine Leroy. © Dotation Catherine Leroy.
Acknowledgments
THIS JOINT BIOGRAPHY would have been close to impossible without the unconditional and generous cooperation of Frances FitzGerald, the Catherine Leroy Foundation, and the family of Kate Webb. They held nothing back from their archives, agreed to lengthy interviews, and asked nothing in return. Every page of this book reflects their open minds and respect for history, even and especially when my inquiries exposed flaws in those they love. They were always gracious, and I am deeply grateful.
The Frances FitzGerald Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archives of Boston University holds extensive materials donated by Frankie from her earliest life through her extensive career, including notebooks, articles, and manuscripts from Vietnam. Frankie patiently answered my questions over three years, most often in person, welcoming me at her home and supplying leads when asked. No issue was off-limits.
The members of the board of the Dotation Catherine Leroy approved my request to delve into their foundation’s archives of Catherine’s photographs, papers, and records, as well as videotaped interviews of those who knew her. Robert Pledge in New York and Dominique Deschavanne in Paris sat for extensive interviews and gave me access to material unavailable to the public. They never pushed back when I asked for more access and went to great lengths to help me locate French journalists who knew Catherine in Vietnam.
Rachel Webb Miller and her husband, Geoff Miller, welcomed me to their home in Sydney, Australia, where I searched on my own through large plastic bins that hold the papers and records of Kate Webb. When I discovered items that had been overlooked, we untangled cryptic notes and papers together and then made photocopies at the local library. They answered countless questions, and in Brisbane, Rachel and her brother Jeremy Webb sat through a final daylong interview about Kate’s life. I appreciated their quiet hospitality, especially after some wrenching discussions about their sister’s life. The family plans to house Kate Webb’s papers in an Australian library.
I also want to thank Professor Joyce Hoffmann, who opened her files at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She is the author of On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam, an almost encyclopedic survey of women who covered the war. Hoffmann’s extensive records were very helpful and gave me leads for my own research.
In the same vein, I would like to thank the women who contributed essays and testimonials to the collection War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam. Several aided my research, especially Denby Fawcett, Jurate Kazickas, and Laura Palmer. Their essays filled many holes in the narrative of women’s struggles, especially those by Anne Morrissy Merick and Ann Bryan Mariano, who was a former colleague of mine at the Washington Post.
Librarians at Boston University and the Library of Congress were more than helpful, ensuring I found all the materials I needed. The librarians at the National Archives in suburban Maryland answered all of my questions and organized the timely release of the classified Vietnam personnel records of Catherine Leroy.
I want to thank Edward Friedman, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin and a scholar of Asia-US relations, for carefully reviewing much of the book.
I have wanted to write this book for years, but every time I tried, it was too difficult emotionally. So I started small, going back to the University of Washington to verify my memories and notes in what, at times, veered between an investigation and a twelve-step program. Thank you to my former professors Frank F. Conlon, historian of South Asia; Michael Shapiro, author of a now classic modern Hindi language primer; and the
late Daniel Lev, a scholar of Southeast Asian politics. Judith Henchy, Southeast Asian Studies librarian, helped transform me into a very active alumni. My Cambodia archives are under her excellent care.
After digging up my papers from the war, I had long informal conversations, not interviews, with literally countless old colleagues and friends and made multiple trips to Vietnam and Cambodia. Sylvana Foa was a touchstone. My close friend Karen DeYoung patiently read through several of my false starts. Thanks to the editor, Clay Risen, I finally found my footing in an opinion piece for the New York Times.
Critically, it was my immense good fortune that Clive Priddle, publisher of PublicAffairs, then took on this project. He saw the importance of the book and how to shape it. He was thoroughly engaged throughout. His thoughtful hands-on editing was exquisite. This book owes much to his editing, and I cannot thank him enough. Plus, he is a joy to work with.
His assistant, Anupama Roy-Chaudhury, and the team at PublicAffairs were always helpful. And I owe a special thanks to Peter Osnos, the founder and publisher emeritus of PublicAffairs. In 1978, Osnos was the Washington Post foreign editor who ensured I had the newspaper’s full support for my eventful trip to Cambodia. Twenty years later, he published an expanded version of my Cambodia book in the first list of PublicAffairs. He and Susan Osnos have always been in my corner.
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